This first issue is brain candy, pure and simple.

We Stand on Guard is light years away from Vaughn’s brilliant output on books like Saga or The Private Eye.

There, she encounters the Two-Four (referring to what we in Canada call a case of our far superior beer, containing 24 bottles), a motley band of freedom fighters waging a guerilla war against the occupying American military. The plot follows an orphaned woman named Amber trekking through the snowy wilderness of the Northwest Territories after her older brother was captured by the invaders some weeks earlier. I just can’t see the rest of the world’s nations standing idly by while America brutally pacifies a peaceful neighbor under the flimsiest of pretenses (apparently Canadian terrorists are a thing). Having said that, I had a little difficulty buying in to Vaughn’s central conceit. unexpectedly invades its northern neighbor to appropriate clean, pure Canadian fresh water, We Stand on Guard at least has a stronger, more realistic premise than my childhood guilty pleasure. Vaughn ( Saga, The Private Eye) and Steve Skroce ( Gambit, Doc Frankenstein). I couldn’t help but remember Red Dawn when reading the latest creator-owned offering from Brian K. But still, my friends and I were mesmerized by the buckets of blood and expansive action sequences. The premise was so improbable it was hard for even an 11-year old boy to suspend his disbelief.

The film was notable for its gratuitous violence but not much else. A small cadre of high-school students, calling themselves the “Wolverines”, mounts a resistance, at the expense of several of their number. Although it featured some of the most popular young stars of the 1980s, the film’s plot felt contrived: somehow, Soviet forces (aided by allies Cuba and Nicaragua) manage to infiltrate American airspace to drop paratroopers outside a rural town in Colorado. One of the first “adult” movies I ever saw was the deliciously cheesy Red Dawn, starring Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, and Lea Thompson. Due to a somewhat improbable premise, the real reason (some might say the only reason) to pick up this new creator-owned series from Image is to get in on the ground floor of fan-favorite Croatian-Canadian cartoonist Steve Skroce’s return to full-time comics work.

Brian k vaughan we stand on guard